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The Rational Response Squad is a group of atheist activists who impact society by changing the way we view god belief. This site is a haven for those who are pushing back against the norm, and a place for believers of gods to have their beliefs exposed as false should they want to try their hand at confronting us.

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#0010 RRS Newsletter for June 10, 2007

Submitted by hellfiend666 on July 22, 2007 - 2:24am.

You may (or may not) have noticed that there was no post yesterday. That would be because I only received a small handfull of things that were worth sharing, and I took that oportunity to take a day off, and that gave me an idea. From now on I will be taking Saturday nights off. So no newsletter on Saturdays, since most of you probably have lives and won't spend your Saturday nights tooling around on the internet anyway.

The feedback I've been getting on these Newsletters has been great (what little I have gotten)! If anyone has any suggestions that you feel would improve upon what I've been doing here, feel free to offer them. I'm always open to suggestion.

Okay, the last time I posted this the link didn't work right. Here is the corrected and expanded version.

The first RRS Michigan Meeting!

The first meeting for the Rational Response Squad Michigan chapter, a 4th of July BBQ party!

Hosted By:
Jack WynneWhen: Wednesday Jul 04, 2007 at 2:00 PMWhere:
Jacks house321 CentralInkster, MI 48141United StatesDescription:This will be an informal event, a chance for us to meet an discuss what we want to see out of this chapter. This will be a BYOB event, but I will be cooking the main courses, including baby back ribs, various grillable fish, chicken, some game, burgers, and hot dogs. If anyone feels so inclined to bring a side dish to add to the spread, I will not object! Space to crash for those who may need it will be available, so I hope to see all of you locals here! You schmucks in Canada and Ohio too!

Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do.

The new findings help shed light on the capabilities of last common ancestor of humans and chimps. And the research could also help develop better robots and artificial intelligences, the researchers say.

In the wild, chimpanzee troops are often distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. Such practices include various forms of tool use, including hammers and pestles; courtship rituals such as leaf-clipping, where leaves are clipped noisily with the teeth; social behaviors such as overhead hand-clasping during mutual grooming; and methods for eradicating parasites by either stabbing or squashing them.

While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.

Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp.

The extremely hot Texas weather made it hard for researchers to work, "and because participation by the chimpanzees in each of these studies has been completely voluntary, it sometimes means that we as experimenters have had to be extremely patient," Spiteri recalled. "Considering the insights we have gathered, it has been worth the sacrifice."

Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.

A number of these chimpanzee groups are next-door neighbors within eyeshot of each other, and researchers found traditions proved catching, with foraging practices spreading from one group to another, findings detailed in the June 19 issue of the journal Current Biology.

"The possibility that some primates may be able to learn from others has great implications on how we treat them and how we think about ourselves," Spiteri told LiveScience. "These results indicate to us that chimps have a capacity for cultural complexity, which was likely shared by our common ancestor going back around 5 million years ago."

This work is "particularly useful to robotic development and artificial intelligence," Spiteri added. "Understanding how the mechanisms of imitation and social learning can help us develop artificial beings that can behave and evolve in the way that we do and ultimately it may help us create other brains."

Alright, I know many of you have seen the first one, at least the bit about the banana. I'm not sure how many of you have seen all three parts though. So here it is.

Everyone must take the time to view this entire documentary...it touches on absolutely everything you need to know. You will not regret it....the best i have seen...EVER! Please Re-post...I appreciate it.

Description: What does Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve have in common? This is the full Zeitgeist production. Please note it is an experiential work; the opening 3 min has no video- just audio, for example.
ZEITGEIST

This Monday, June 11th, ONE launches our unprecedented new initiative, ONE Vote '08, a non-partisan campaign to make global health and extreme poverty foreign policy priorities in the 2008 presidential election. ONE Vote '08 will make sure that every presidential candidate takes a clear position on the issues important to ONE supporters like you.

In order for the candidates to hear ONE's message, though, we need your voice.

First, the co-chairs of ONE Vote '08, former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist, and ONE CEO Susan McCue will discuss the campaign strategy, and then they will move to answering your questions. You will also be joined by actor and celebrity Ben Affleck.

While the media is already saturated with election coverage, thousands are dying every day from completely preventable diseases and other poverty-related causes. Help us launch a new era in American politics by refusing to allow the world's poor to be relegated to afterthoughts.

In his latest book, “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens makes the case against religion and for “free inquiry and open-mindedness.” Hitchens, of course, is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School, and author of many books. He spoke recently with Truthdig’s Jon Wiener.

Jon Wiener: You show in your book how many horrible things men have done because of religion. In Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade and Baghdad, men kill other men, and say God told them to do it. But why blame God for the bad things that men do?

Christopher Hitchens: I don’t blame God. I blame religion. I don’t believe there is such a thing as God. Religion makes people do wicked things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. It doesn’t make them behave better—it makes them behave worse. You couldn’t get people to hack away at the genitals of their newborn children if they didn’t think there was a religious obligation to do so. The licenses for genocide, slavery, racism, are all right there in the holy text.

Wiener: Yes, the Old Testament is full of these horrors. But it also contains the Ten Commandments, prohibiting killing, stealing, adultery, and lying—isn’t this a good thing?

Hitchens: No. it’s not. Because these are prefaced by a series of injunctions to fear a permanent, unalterable dictatorship. The first three commandments say “just realize who’s boss.” Let’s assume the story of Moses is true, even though archaeologists have utterly discredited it. Do our Jewish ancestors have to put up with the insult from us at this late stage that, until they got to Sinai, they thought murder and theft and perjury were OK? Of course not. There would have been no such people if they thought that. There has never been a society or civilization that did warrant those things. And you don’t need divine urging to see that they’re wrong yourself.

Wiener: There’s one other commandment, the tenth—thou shalt not covet.

Hitchens: That is a particularly horrible crime of dictatorship, namely the crime of thought. It says you can’t even think about this. To say you’re not allowed to steal your neighbor’s possessions—including his wife—that’s one thing. But to say you’re not allowed to envy your neighbor is absurd. It’s impossible. And the spirit of envy can lead to ambition and innovation and initiative. I would say that’s an immoral commandment.

Wiener: Let’s talk about Islam. You point out that the 9/11 terrorists said Allah wanted them to fly planes into buildings. But there are something like a billion Muslims in the world today, and only 19 of them flew planes into the World Trade Center. Why hold all of Islam responsible for the acts of those 19?

Hitchens: I don’t. Islam in fact has one advantage over Christianity—it doesn’t have a papacy. There is no center that can say “we condemn this” or “we support this,” the way the church supported Franco Spain and said prayers in Germany on Hitler’s birthday by order of the Vatican. But the centers of legislation and authority in the Islamic world, such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, have a lot of difficulty condemning suicide bombing. In fact they’ve never got around to doing it. They can’t seem to condemn even the blowing up of other Muslims—in Iraq, for instance, where they are blowing up each other’s children and each other’s holy places. No words seem to come from either Sunni or Shiite religious authorities there or elsewhere in the world saying “this is wrong.” That’s because they don’t really think it is. If it’s done for their cause, they surreptitiously sympathize with it, and you can detect that surreptitious sympathy if you read any of the statements from the Muslim authorities. That’s a grave crisis for Islam—and for us, too.

Wiener: Are you saying Islam is worse than other religions? It seems to me your position has to be that all religions are equally bad.

Hitchens: The position I take in the book is, of course, that all religion is equally stupid and an expression of contempt for reason and an exaltation of the idea of faith, of believing things without evidence. But that doesn’t mean I think a Quaker and a Bin Laden are exactly the same. They all have individual disadvantages. I would say that, with Catholicism, the mad insistence on celibacy is peculiarly deforming. With Islam, the problem is that it claims to be the last and final revelation. All that’s required now is that everybody realize the truth of this book. That’s extremely dangerous preaching, in my opinion.

Wiener: Don’t Christian fundamentalists say pretty much the same thing?

Hitchens: Yes they do. But I think there is a real problem with Islam of intolerance in that way—it forbids itself to have a reformation. That’s fanatical and actually murderous right now.

Wiener: Is the problem you have been describing religion per se, or is it the monotheistic religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, Islam? Are Eastern religions different and better? Especially Buddhism, with its compassion for all living things; especially Tibetan Buddhism, with its impressive leader, the Dalai Lama.

Hitchens: The Dalai Lama claims to be a hereditary god and a hereditary king. I don’t think any decent person can assent to that proposition. You should take a look at what Tibet was like when it was run by the lamas. Buddhism has some of the same problems as Western religion. Zen was the official ideology of Hirohito’s fascism that was used to conquer and reduce the rest of Asia to subservience. The current dictatorship in Burma is officially Buddhist. The Buddhist forces in Sri Lanka are the ones who began the horrific civil war there with their pogroms against the Tamils in the 1950s and 1960s. Lon Nol’s army in Cambodia was officially Buddhist.

Wiener: Let’s talk about the U.S. Polls show that 94 per cent of Americans believe in God, and 89 per cent believe in heaven; of those, three-fourths think they will go to heaven, but only 2 per cent think they will go to hell. This seems laughable, but what’s the harm in people believing they will go to heaven after they die—and see their mothers there?

Hitchens: All you have to do is promise them 72 virgins, and they’ll kill to get there. That’s what’s wrong with it, along with the fact that it’s a solipsistic delusion. And the spreading of delusion in the end isn’t a good thing, because credulous and deluded people are easy to exploit. People arise who are aware of that fact.

If belief in heaven was private, like the tooth fairy, I’d say fine. But tooth fairy supporters don’t come around to your house and try to convert you. They don’t try to teach your children stultifying pseudo-science in school. They don’t try to prevent access to contraception. The religious won’t leave us alone. These are not just private delusions, they’re ones they want to inflict on other people.

Wiener: Of course, you are right that we have Pat Robertson and, until recently, Jerry Falwell, saying horrible things in the name of religion. Both welcomed 9/11 as payback for America’s tolerance of homosexuality and abortion. But we have also had Martin Luther King and Daniel Berrigan and William Sloane Coffin. Why not conclude that religion can lead people to do good things as well as bad?

Hitchens: Let me start with a question: Can you name a moral action taken, or a moral statement made, by a believer that could not have been made by an atheist? I don’t think so. I’ll take your case at its strongest—that would be Dr. King. Fortunately for us, he wasn’t really a Christian, because if he had followed the preachments in Exodus about the long march to freedom, he would have invoked the right that the Bible gives to take the land of others, to enslave other tribes, to kill their members, to rape their women, and to destroy them down to their uttermost child. Fortunately for us, he didn’t take that route.

The people who actually organized the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph, were both secularists and socialists. The whole case for the emancipation of black America had already been made perfectly well by secularists. I don’t particularly object to the tactic of quoting the Bible against the white Christian institutions that maintained at first slavery and then segregation. But there’s no authority in the Bible for civil rights—none whatever. There is authority for slavery and segregation.

The widespread view among white liberals that black people in some way prefer to be led by preachers is a condescending one. It leaves out heroes of the movement like Rustin and Randolph, and has licensed the assumption that people like Jesse Jackson and, much worse, a complete charlatan and thug like Al Sharpton, are somehow OK because they’ve got the word “Reverend” in front of their names. That’s done enormous damage, not just to black people, but to the country in general. It’s the Falwell equivalent.

Wiener: What about practical politics for progressives: since almost all Americans believe in God, for progressives to attack, ridicule and dismiss religion as you do is political suicide that will ensure religious Republican domination forever. Instead, we must argue that God is not on their side, and we must respect the fact that people belong to different communities of belief.

Hitchens: If you want to argue that God is not on their side, you can’t argue “that’s because he’s on my side”—you have to argue there is no such person. Marxism begins by arguing that people have to emancipate their minds. The beginning of that emancipation is outgrowing of religion. If religion were true, there would be no need for politics; you’d only need to have faith.

Wiener: I know you’ve often been told that everybody has faith in something—for most Americans, it’s Jesus; for you, it’s reason and science.

Hitchens: That’s not faith, by definition. You can’t have faith in reason. It’s not a dogma. It’s a conviction that this is the only way that discovery and progress can be made.

Wiener: The intelligent person’s argument for religion is that religion and rationality don’t compete—they deal with different parts of life. Religion answers questions that science doesn’t: Why do the innocent suffer? What is the meaning of life? What happens when we die?

Hitchens: I wish it was true. But, in fact, religion doesn’t keep its part of the bargain here. It incessantly seeks to limit first discoveries and innovation in science and then their application. Galileo, of course, but more recently discoveries about the possibilities of limiting the size of your family. Really, they don’t want us to reconsider our place in the universe, because if we face the fact that we live on a tiny speck in an immense universe, it’s going to be difficult to convince people it was all created with that tiny speck in mind. It’s not possible to believe that nonsense if you have any interest in science.

Wiener: The final killer argument of your critics is that Hitler and Stalin were not religious. The worst crimes of the 20th century did not have a religious basis. They came from political ideology.

Hitchens: That’s easy. Hitler never abandoned Christianity and recommends Catholicism quite highly in “Mein Kampf.” Fascism, as distinct from National Socialism, was in effect a Catholic movement.

Wiener: What about Stalin? He wasn’t religious.

Hitchens: Stalin—easier still. For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you’re Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you can’t exploit the pool of servility and docility that’s ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

Just curious, do you just sit and complain about religion or do you actually get up and try to do something about it?

Seriously.

Have you done anything in your community to try to balance the scales (so to speak)?

I would just like to know what actions others have taken. Or any ideas you might have for others to do in their communities.

Creation science is creeping quietly back into the classrooms, scientific research is being blocked because of religious belief, abstinence only education is being pushed often due to religious belief, hospitals are unable to perform certain procedures due to the religious affiliation of their contributors, and political decisions are being based on religious belief. I sure as hell think that we can't just sit back and do nothing. Sure, people have a right to believe in whatever nonsense they want to, but it should not infringe upon the rights of others, which it IS doing.

House Passes Stem Cell Bill Despite Veto ThreatSpeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, left, talks to Alex Pitts, 6, and his mother Melissa, while Senate majority leader Harry Reid celebrates the passage of the bill with Toni Bethea, 11.

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, June 7 — The House gave final Congressional approval today to legislation intended to ease restrictions on federal financing of embryonic stem cell research, sending a bipartisan measure to the White House that President Bush has pledged to veto.

On a vote of 247 to 176, the House overwhelmingly passed the bill, with Republicans and Democrats forging a coalition to authorize federal support for research using stem cells derived from spare embryos that fertility clinics would otherwise discard. The Senate approved the legislation in April.

“Science is a gift of God to all of us and science has taken us to a place that is biblical in its power to cure,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. “And that is the embryonic stem cell research.”

The president has repeatedly vowed to veto the bill, following through on the first veto of his presidency when he rejected a similar stem cell proposal last year, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress. Democrats were not certain whether they had the votes to override a veto.

“I am disappointed the leadership of Congress recycled an old bill that would simply overturn our country’s carefully balanced policy on embryonic stem cell research,” Mr. Bush said in a statement. “If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would for the first time in our history be compelled to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos. Crossing that line would be a grave mistake.”

Critics of the legislation said taxpayer dollars should not be used to increase spending on embryonic stem cell research, particularly in the wake of a new scientific advance reported Wednesday in which biologists believe they can use skin to generate new heart, liver or kidney cells. Such a technique, if proven successful, could sidestep the ethical debates surrounding stem cell research.

Throughout the Congressional debate, several Republicans who oppose the legislation seized upon reports of the new scientific advance.

“How many more advancements in noncontroversial, ethical, adult stem cell research will it take before Congress decides to catch up with science?” said Representative Joseph Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican, holding up a front-page newspaper account of the scientific discovery. “These have all of the potential and none of the controversy.”

While those who support increasing the federal financing of embryonic stem cell research also hailed the development, they said such advances should not replace expanding research to press for a litany of diseases, including Alzheimer’s and juvenile diabetes.

“We welcome these advances as we welcome all advances in ethical life-saving research,” said Representative Diana L. DeGette, a Colorado Democrat and leading sponsor of the legislation. “However, this new scientific research should not be used as an excuse to say that it is a substitute for embryonic stem cell research.”

While Democrats urged the president to change his mind and sign the legislation into law, they said they would try to build support to override the presidential veto. Their campaign began today, only hours after the bill was passed, when Ms. Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, staged a rare public enrollment ceremony to send the legislation to the White House.

The attempt to override the president’s veto would begin in the Senate, where the bill passed April 11 on a vote of 63 to 34. Even counting the three Democrats who were not present for the vote, the legislation fell one vote shy of reaching the plateau to override a veto.

Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, began circulating a petition today to push for the expansion of the federal financing for the embryonic stem cell research. “Tell President Bush: Stop being stubborn, sign the stem cell bill,” the petition read.

A senior administration official said Mr. Bush, who is traveling in Europe, was not expected to veto the bill until his return to Washington next week.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said Democrats who pushed the legislation were simply trying to turn the stem cell debate into a political opportunity.

“This is politics. This is not about expanding research,” Mr. Boehner said today. “They understand clearly that the president has vetoed this bill in the past and will veto it again. This is Washington being Washington, trying to score a political points, one party opposed to another.”

For the 13th month out of the last 15, the boycott of Ford Motor Company by AFA and other pro-family groups has helped cause Ford to lose sales. Sales dropped 6.8% during May when compared with May 2006.

The drop came as sales for GM [up 9.6%], Chrysler [up 4.3%] and Toyota [up 14%] were all increasing. Of the big four, only Ford showed a loss.

AFA has identified Ford as a leading corporate promoter of homosexual marriage and the homosexual agenda. For more information on Ford?s promotion of the homosexual lifestyle, click here. More than 700,000 individuals have signed the Boycott Ford Pledge.

Even while losing billions of dollars and laying off of thousands of employees, Ford continues to financially support various homosexual groups.

Despite the effectiveness of the boycott, the mainstream media has refused to cover the story. Had homosexuals been boycotting Ford, the boycott would have been given extensive play in the mainstream media.

Because the mainstream media refuses to cover the boycott, AFA is asking that individuals forward this e-mail to friends and family.

*
Forward this e-mail to your local Lincoln, Mercury, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda or Ford dealer (all owned by Ford). Find their e-mail address here (click on the auto icon). Ask the dealer to forward it to CEO Alan Mulally.
*Print the Boycott Ford Petition and distribute it at Sunday school and church.
*
Extremely important! Help us get the word out about Ford by forwarding this to friends and family! For more information on Ford's support for the homosexual agenda, click here.

If you think our efforts are worthy, would you please support us with a small gift? Thank you for caring enough to get involved.

Please help us get this information into the hands of as many people as possible by forwarding it to your family and friends.

Sincerely,

Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman
American Family Association

P.S. Please forward this e-mail message to your family and friends!

We are The A-Team and we applaud Ford Motors for their open support of equal rights for all Americans. And we find nothing "pro-family" about the American Family Association or their campaign of hate.